Not too wacky of a weekend. I did leave the house Saturday afternoon to meet some friends for lunch, but that’s about it. The rest of the weekend was spent working on my trusty webserver. Oh no, it broke, you ask? Well not exactly; I broke it. It’s just what I do. I use a Synology server, which is commonly known for being “easy.” Set it up, get it working, and leave it alone. Seems it’s that last part I have issues with. I’ve been using the same system for at least 15 years. I’ve upgraded them, moved to new hardware a few times, and replaced a few things. This is all, as advertised, “easy.” Everything has always run fine for the most part, except when I decide to “fix” something. This is one of those cases again. Some years ago (10-ish maybe?) Synology came out with support for the BTRFS file system. And every day since, my thoughts have been consumed with how I can switch to it from my EXT4 format. Why? Because I don’t have it, I guess. I don’t even really know what it is, or if/how it would benefit me. But, switching over does not fall into the “easy” category like everything else. You have to delete everything and start from scratch. That’s a little disconcerting. That’s this website, 20+ years of pictures and documents, all kinds of handy little utilities I use every day… it’s actually very disconcerting. Well, after years and years of thinking on it, (again, for no good reason,) I decided to work on it this weekend. The wife is out of town, it’s still too hot to be outside… Time to dive in. I thought I came up with a plan where I could move everything instead of outright deleting it. So that’s how I spent my weekend. Moving huge amounts of files, waiting for it to finish, and then figuring out what was broken. Oh, and things did break. Hopefully they all got fixed, because things are harder to fix as time goes by and I can’t really remember exactly what I did. Now I’m at the point where I actually delete everything remaining and hope for the best. Just couldn’t quite pull the trigger on that part yet. It’s coming though. Should you happen to stop by here in the next few weeks and my website is down, it didn’t go well.

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Wednesday is an odd day for an update, but I’ve been in recovery mode. We traveled to Seattle for a quick weekend trip, and I’m still worn out. (Doesn’t take much these days, really.) I had a great time there and didn’t want to just skip the update altogether though, so here is it.

We took off on the trip Friday, and after a short flight and getting settled into our apartment we still had time to find some dinner. The first place that jumped out at us was a nearby Capitol Grille. We haven’t been there since moving from KC, and sure have missed it. Our friends here gave us grief for going to a “chain” while on vacation, but then they’ve never been to one. Uh yeah, it ain’t exactly Taco Bell. We had our sights set on the calamari, as it’s one of our favorites, but when we saw the Wagyu & Wine special, we couldn’t pass it up. It was fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it was way more food than I was expecting. It effectively ended our evening; we were too stuffed. It had been a long day traveling anyway, so we turned in.

Saturday, we went on a walking “Seafood Tour” down in the famous City Markey district. This turned out to be a great time, highly recommended. It was very interesting, and we sampled lots of different seafood. (And, bonus, the best clam chowder I’ve ever had.) We tried smoked salmon, a few different pokes, oysters, shrimp, scallops, cod… I’m sure I am missing a few but those come to mind at the moment. All in all, a big success. After that tour, we decided to take a walk down to the ballpark and catch a Mariners game. Tickets were reasonable, and there were plenty available last minute. It was about a mile walk, but we made a few stops along the way, so it wasn’t too bad. It was a little rainy, so we put lots of work into finding seats under an overhang, only to get there and find it is a covered stadium. Oh well, better safe than wet. Very nice stadium. Good fans, good game, and they even pulled out a win. (Not that we had much interest if they won or not, but it did make it more exciting.)

Sunday, it was time to go back home, but we still had time to walk back to the Piers for a boat tour. On the way, we stopped at a place called Ludi’s for some breakfast. We passed it on one of our walks the day before, and they had a line out the door. Must be good, we’ll try it! Indeed, it was fantastic. Sort of a little cafe, and the owner was super nice. (All of the employees were, as a matter of fact.) We noticed several people getting their picture taken with the owner, so we did a little searching and found an article on the place. He stopped by our table and talked for a while, very interesting guy with interesting history. Actually, between his rather strong Filipino accent and my marginal hearing, I didn’t catch it all, but I got the gist. After breakfast we went on the quick one-hour boat tour and got a few more good history bits, then it was time to get back home. Great trip!

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Not a bad weekend, if perhaps a bit uneventful. Other adjectives might be unproductive, boring, tedious… Let’s stick with “uneventful” though. I really got sucked in by the start of the football season, and just didn’t quite get around to doing anything else. Probably should have done something wacky on Friday evening so I could say I at least did something, but I had to rest up for my weekend on the couch, I guess. At least I can say the games went favorably! All my favorite teams won, both college and pro, and my not-so-favorite (i.e. despised) teams all lost. **Not to include the 49ers game, which hasn’t been played yet. I can’t really say they fall on my “favorites” list anyway, but I do try and follow them.

Sunday, we did have some friends up for dinner, so at least we had one “event” over the weekend. True, I sat on the couch and stared at the football games the whole time, but then I’m not that good of company anyway. I invited them up a last week after the local butcher shop advertised that they had some SRF steaks on hand. I’ve purchased a brisket off that website before, (and it was great,) but never the steaks. Just never quite been able to pull the trigger on ordering them off the website. Regardless of whether they are “worth it” or not, it’s just a lot of money to spend on steaks, and then they ding you additional for shipping of course. So, this was my chance to try them without the shipping charge, and as an added bonus they were actually a bit cheaper than the prices on the website. Anyway, overall rating, I will definitely buy them again if I see them at the butcher shop. Wow, they were good. Super rich though, two steaks fed the four of us easily. Donette made a new potato salad also that came out really well. Had a good time!

Lacking any other real content, I shall provide a few mini-rants stemming from grave injustices I suffered recently. First up is a local grocery revelation that occurred last week. Since our move out here, my go-to store has always been Nugget Markets. Heck, I’ve even got a link to them on my page. Love(d) that store. That decade-long support came to an end last week when I signed up for the weekly email from the Fork Lift store down in Cameron Park. As soon as I got my grocery ads on Wednesday (which is a huge moment of excitement in my life,) the scam became obvious. My Nugget ad and Fork Lift ad were exactly the same flyer. Not just similar, the exact same ad with a different name at the top. The same that is, except for the prices; Every single item at Fork Lift was between $1 and $2 cheaper. Every single one! That really adds up over a full grocery cart. Added bonus, it’s half the distance from my house. To think of all the money I’ve wasted over these years, tsk tsk. Just a few examples of this treachery:

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Next up, an advertisement I saw on FaceBook for a local restaurant. Behold:

Tell me please, what exactly IS “Kansas style BBQ?” You can’t, of course, because IT DOESN’T EXIST!!! THERE IS NO SUCH THING!!!! This place is actually one of my favorites too, so it was a double whammy. I am not kidding, this actually marks the second time I have encountered this reference out here. The first was at a restaurant in EDH, which I was able to shake off as being… Well… In EDH. They don’t know any better, bless their hearts. (It was actually for “Kansas style ribs” though, which might be even more egregious.) So, now I am forced to strike my favorite steakhouse off my list of places to eat. They are dead to me.

Other random pictures:

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Just kidding, we didn’t have any excitement. Never do, sigh. Probably wouldn’t know what to do if I did actually find some excitement, so it’s safer this way. We pretty much just hung out and enjoyed the long weekend. We had a few interesting moments, if not particularly exciting… Did a small winery tour on Saturday and tried out a couple of new recipes over the weekend.

Friday, we tried out the first food experiment; Philly Cheesesteaks. Yeah, we’ve made cheesesteaks before, but always the traditional “shave up a ribeye and griddle it” kind of thing. This time I used a cross-rib roast instead of a steak. This oddity was, as is usually the case, driven by the fact that the roast was cheap. At least 1/3 the price of a good ribeye. Only trouble is, it’s NOT a ribeye. I really have never even heard of the cut, but for five bucks a pound I decided to give it a try. I ended up dropping it in the sous vide cooker for 30 hours at 130 degrees, and it worked out well. Only thing I’d change was, we didn’t like the rolls we ended up with. Good news is, we have plenty of beef left over so we’ll just get some different ones and try again.

The other thing we tried out was a rib recipe off the Bachans bbq sauce site. I’m honestly not sure how I ended up coming across that recipe, but I thought it looked good. And, luckily, it did come out pretty good, because we had some friends over to join us for dinner. Risky! I was pretty happy with the ribs, but next time I’ll start checking the temp sooner. I let them run the two hours listed in the recipe before checking them, and when I got ready to do the foil step they were already pretty much done. Oops. I cut the last step down to 30 minutes, and they survived.

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Wow, it’s cold up here!! OK, it WAS cold for a brief period of time. Friday, due to some wacky weather phenomenon I didn’t care to research, it dropped from 90+ to 60. That’s a downright midwest-esque weather swing there. It stayed cool all through the weekend, which was a very welcome break. Saturday it even rained! Can’t remember the last time it rained, but it’s been several months. Of course, when it really started coming down, I happened to be out grocery shopping. In my Jeep. With no top on it. Whoops. Yeah, it got wet, and so did I. I went across the street and had lunch to wait it out, and it came down for quite a while. You could tell it was a big deal from the number of people I saw in the parking lot taking pictures of the rain. (Or were they taking pictures of the Jeep filling up with water? Who knows.)

That night we drove up to the Knott Hole Bar & Grill to watch some friends sing. They had a brief stint of four people in the band, but now they’ve gone back to just the two of them. They sounded great, and it was fantastic weather to sit outside and watch them. They play a few other spots nearby, but we usually miss out because they play past our bedtime. (Which is admittedly rather early, but I guess that happens when you get old.)

Sunday we just laid around the house with the windows open and enjoyed the last day of the cool weather. Fired up the grill, watched some movies, and that wrapped up the weekend.

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